People pay for curation today, not the content. The content is cheap and mostly free.

Apple just have away a U2’s new album. You can already stream any track you want on Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud. Unless you’re reading the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, there’s no paywall preventing you from getting free news. Meanwhile, Amazon is pushing for an all you can eat books model as part of their Prime service.

Free content means that what people are really paying for are the quality of recommendations thy get in return. Peer recommendations don’t suffice.. You only want to consume the good stuff that master curators spend the time to find.

What made Songza different than the rest of the music streaming networks was its handpicked, contextual playlists based on time of day. Echo Nest plans to turn Spotify into a recommendation engine. What makes Amazon so good at recommending books is its smart algorithm.

The wisdom of crowds theory that said that the best result is the summary of what everyone is looking for is dead. People don’t want to be manipulated by mainstream culture. The best services will find out what niche genres a person likes and make long-tail recommendations around those. Make the users feel like they found it first.

Content and curation are BFFs. The two go hand in hand. The act of curation gives content it’s true value. People just want to hear about the good stuff and ignore the rest.

When it comes to information and music I’m more lean in than lean back. Everyone is interested in these topics but most people would rather consume them from the top-down rather than playing the part of curator/influencer and actively searching for them.

For example, most people prefer to listen to the radio because it takes the stress out of deciding what song to hear next. Actively building playlists takes a lot of time, especially for someone that just uses music to enhance their mood. The same can be said for news: most people would rather get all of it from one source like the New York Times.

The 90-9-1 rule of social media says that 90% of people just consume the feeds, 9% curate them (e.g. retweet), and 1% of users create original content. Lurking along is easy. Curation is hard. But creativity is harder.

Everyone needs a ‘lean in’ topic where they get to show their expertise. It doesn’t have to be tech news or electronic music, as I tend to discover and share. It just needs to be seething you’re passionate about. There’s a niche online for everybody.